February 16, 2023 — When fishermen and women look at the gray Atlantic waters off New England, they see a marine environment literally swimming with cod, the popular white fish prized around the world for its mild flavor.
Scientists, on the other hand, say Atlantic cod stocks in the Gulf of Maine are severely depleted and possibly vulnerable to extinction.
The question of how fishermen and marine scientists employed by government agencies can view cod numbers so differently has puzzled Micah Dean, a marine biologist with the state of Massachusetts, for years.
While a doctoral student at Northeastern University, Dean believed he came up with an answer.
In a paper published recently by the Canadian Journal of Fisheries and Aquatic Sciences—appropriately titled “Lost in Translation”—Dean says that fishermen and scientists view the ocean depths with such different lenses that they are literally not seeing the same things.
“We did a telephone survey and we asked commercial fishermen, over the last 10 years, do you think the cod population in the Gulf of Maine has gone down a lot, gone down a little, stayed the same, gone up a little or gone up a lot,” Dean says.